Website Image Standard

Adding image to your webpage affects the speed of how fast the web page will load to a user’s browser. Most images that fall within the boundaries, which are mentioned in this page, would only delay your web page by milliseconds. Basically, visitors will not notice any delay in loading.

Web Site Image File Size

Bytes, kilobytes or megabytes represent the file size of your image. The file size is what makes all the difference in how fast your page loads. Paying close attention to the file size is important. It is always best to choose images that do not have too large of a file size. You can reduce an image file size by changing it’s format or reducing the image size, just place special attention to how much quality reduction you take from the original image.

Web Browser Image Standard Formats

The two standard formats usable to all web browsers are JPEG & GIF. We’ve seen PNG format as well, but it is not as common. If your image is other than these formats, your web page may load slowly. Therefore, we recommend you convert your image to this browser-excepted standard.

Web Site Image File Formats & Quality

JPEG - stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. This format supports 16 million colors and uses a "lossy" form of compression. This means that it throws away unnecessary information and/or colors. This format can reduce image file size up to 5% off it’s original file size and is ideal for photos and larger, more complicated images that have a lot of shading. I do not recommend it for images with small text, as the text can get blurry.

GIF - stands for Graphics Interchange Format. This format supports only 256 colors and uses a "lossless" form of compression. This means no data will be lost forever. The bonus with GIF format is that it supports transparent images. That is images where the web page background color shows through the parts of the image that you want to show as clear. This is best for smaller, less complicated images with fewer colors such as buttons and banners. However, it does not handle shadings and semi-transparencies well. Another bonus with GIF is the availability of animated images.

PNG - I do not know much about the format called PNG, but I can tell you what I have found out about it with a bit of research. PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics. It is a license-free alternative to GIF. The latest version of Netscape and Internet Explorer supports this format. I am not sure which other browsers can. This format is an improvement on the GIF transparencies and can better handle semi-transparencies, although it does not support animations. PNG can compress an image up to 20% more than the GIF format and uses "lossless" compression.

Choose the appropriate format that best suits the image quality you require. If you experience slowdown on your web page load, then consider converting the image to a different format mentioned here. For example, converting a JPEG image to GIF image can reduce the file size down to half.

Web Site Image Size & Resizing

Image size is the physical size of the image in pixels, inches, or centimeters, which is what you visually see. Large images may slowdown your web page load. Try reducing the size of the image. The All In One Easy Website builder includes an image resizing tool built in for convenience. When you reduce the size of your image, the resizing tool will automatically reduce the byte size of the image file. Therefore, reducing an image size can improve the speed of your web page load.

Website Image Resolution

If you use a scanned image on your web page ensure the resolution is between 72 and 95 dpi (dots per inch). Most computer monitors use this resolution, therefore setting it any higher than that would be a waste of file size. In reverse, we do not recommend to have the setting lower either, because it will impact the image quality a great deal.

Image editing programs have the ability to compress images automatically. Tread carefully and experiment if you use this method to reduce the size of your image file.

Watch The Quantity Of Image In Your Web Page

A picture can say a thousand words, and sometimes we load our web page with so many images for the sole purpose in making a good impression. But if your images take forever to load you are compromising your web page from being accessed by your visitors. Your visitors and potential customer will likely not wait. If they had to choose between a website that takes too long to load and one that loads almost instantly, they will surely choose the latter. So follow the web site image standards provided to you here and it should help prevent web page slowdown. If following the standards still fails, then it comes down to determining what is too much. Generally, your web page should not take more than 8 to 10 seconds to load. If it does, it is time to put fewer images on that web page.